


War Memorial

by Daelf



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: (oh hey it's already a tag! yay writing traditions!), Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Regeneration, how does it even work, why am i overthinking this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 15:37:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11188146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daelf/pseuds/Daelf
Summary: An unknown Time Lord once regenerated on a alien battlefield. The event left quite an impression on the locals…





	War Memorial

**Author's Note:**

> This probably counts as an alternate interpretation of DW canon (haha)(sorry I can't write that with a straight face) on how regeneration works, but the idea’s been bugging me for months, and after a recent episode it finally couldn’t take it anymore and *demanded* to be written, so there.

Sometimes, when people come over to visit the old battlefield that is my (very large) garden, sometimes – rarely – one of them will notice a weird hole in the high grasses. I notice their eyes lingering on it when it happens… Even more rarely, they will ask about it.

— Ah, yes, _that_ hole. Well, they say… they say that a Time Lord died there during the battle – and was reborn. I’ll show you if you want… Come!

Most of the time, they’re startled and confused. They expected me to dismiss the question, expected me to say that it’s just a heap of stones that happen to lie there, or a beast that dug a hole in the ground, and it shows in the way the grass sway in the wind. Or maybe, on the contrary, they think I’ll invoke some dark secret, warn them against trying to understand what’s actually going on there.  
I always smile at their confusion. And while we walk towards the spot, I explain.

— See, a little known fact about the battle is that a Time Lord was, indeed, present. They’d been following people from one side for months, doing Time Lord stuff – gathering information to preserve it, or trying to influence the outcome of the battle – who knows? But then, they got careless, and stepped out of their shelter when they shouldn’t have… and took a mortal blow to the chest.

By then, we’re usually close enough to notice a clearer outline of the anomaly. It’s smaller than we are, and thinner.

— A few eyewitnesses who survived the battle insisted that it was not ended by a star fallen from the sky, as tradition states, but by a fire that was born from the Time Lord and didn’t burn anything but them. Most warriors involved here fled at the sight of that unnatural light, and tried later to make sense of it, saying that it fell from the sky since it was as bright as the sun…

And just like that, we’re there.

There’s a silhouette on the ground, bare soil littered with stones and dust and the occasional shell or bone. Nothing grows there, nothing crawls, and nothing walks. It looks a bit like the shadow one of us might cast if we had only the vertical half of our body, only four limbs, the absence of a hind, horizontal back painfully obvious – and the head part is too small, lacks horns, and just plain looks _wrong_.  
It always shocks. The incomplete silhouette, the tidiness of that contrast between the grass and the dirt.

Sometimes, one will ask: since they died here, was their body left to rot and poison the ground? Did no-one take care of their remains? Sometimes they will admit that if we’d known even back then how a Time Lord body would do so much harm to the ground, no-one would dare touch it, let alone move it. But still, they’re confused. They’re upset. They miss the obvious. I remind them.

— It’s rare that a Time Lord dies and their body stays dead, it happens about once in twelve Time Lord deaths. Like I said, this one died – and then was reborn: they “regenerated”. One witness who may have known them even said… You know, Time Lord genders are not like our own. But if you accept a crude analogy, this one died a [protector] and was reborn a [teacher]. And then, after they died, after the light gave them a new life, and they noticed where they were – when they noticed people like us were fleeing from where they now stood – they fled too. And no-one knows what became of them.

The visitor usually takes a moment to process that. The light, that was not from the sky but from a legendary being. The gender change. The fearsome being, fleeing in fear, in confusion. And then, the _interesting_ question finally comes…

— Aaah… Well, when Time Lords regenerate, they need energy. And they need to take it from somewhere, right? And they can’t get it all from their own body. So they take it where and _when_ they can find it…

And I try to describe the process, as it’s been explained to me once, long ago, by the previous guardian of this place. The dying body, wich can reach in directions we can only dream of – in that exact same spot the Time Lord is lying, but in the past and the future… and there, it takes whatever energy it can find. Sunlight. Animals. Electricity. _Anything_.  
And brings it back to the dying body, to help it rebuild itself.

— … and so, for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, where a Time Lord regenerates, nothing will grow. Nothing will work with electricity, and nothing will burn. Nothing will live, but that one Time Lord, walking away after having died there.

The visitor usually takes some more time to process this. If they were upset before, it’s nothing compared to what they are feeling now. Awe, disgust, fear, fascination, everything happens at the same time. I usually can spot the moment they just give up.

… This one, however, does not.

They nod. They reach inside the bag hanging at their side – from their high shoulder and under their arm, not on their hind back, which I’d found slightly odd earlier when meeting them.

They take a small tube from it, with a bright flower inside, and before I can warn them, they reach towars the center of the anomaly…

And gently plant the tube there, with the strange flower glowing with vibrant colours, and remove their arm – both flower and limb completely unharmed.

I swear I see their appearance flicker for one moment, leaving them far too small and thin, with only four limbs and no hind back. ‘That would explain the bag’, I realize – before wondering why I would even think that, since they look perfectly normal.

Then they just nod, thank me, and walk away.


End file.
